619 research outputs found
One-Tape Turing Machine Variants and Language Recognition
We present two restricted versions of one-tape Turing machines. Both
characterize the class of context-free languages. In the first version,
proposed by Hibbard in 1967 and called limited automata, each tape cell can be
rewritten only in the first visits, for a fixed constant .
Furthermore, for deterministic limited automata are equivalent to
deterministic pushdown automata, namely they characterize deterministic
context-free languages. Further restricting the possible operations, we
consider strongly limited automata. These models still characterize
context-free languages. However, the deterministic version is less powerful
than the deterministic version of limited automata. In fact, there exist
deterministic context-free languages that are not accepted by any deterministic
strongly limited automaton.Comment: 20 pages. This article will appear in the Complexity Theory Column of
the September 2015 issue of SIGACT New
Reasoning about transfinite sequences
We introduce a family of temporal logics to specify the behavior of systems
with Zeno behaviors. We extend linear-time temporal logic LTL to authorize
models admitting Zeno sequences of actions and quantitative temporal operators
indexed by ordinals replace the standard next-time and until future-time
operators. Our aim is to control such systems by designing controllers that
safely work on -sequences but interact synchronously with the system in
order to restrict their behaviors. We show that the satisfiability problem for
the logics working on -sequences is EXPSPACE-complete when the
integers are represented in binary, and PSPACE-complete with a unary
representation. To do so, we substantially extend standard results about LTL by
introducing a new class of succinct ordinal automata that can encode the
interaction between the different quantitative temporal operators.Comment: 38 page
Syntactic Complexity of Circular Semi-Flower Automata
We investigate the syntactic complexity of certain types of finitely
generated submonoids of a free monoid. In fact, we consider those submonoids
which are accepted by circular semi-flower automata (CSFA). Here, we show that
the syntactic complexity of CSFA with at most one `branch point going in' (bpi)
is linear. Further, we prove that the syntactic complexity of -state CSFA
with two bpis over a binary alphabet is
Logic Meets Algebra: the Case of Regular Languages
The study of finite automata and regular languages is a privileged meeting
point of algebra and logic. Since the work of Buchi, regular languages have
been classified according to their descriptive complexity, i.e. the type of
logical formalism required to define them. The algebraic point of view on
automata is an essential complement of this classification: by providing
alternative, algebraic characterizations for the classes, it often yields the
only opportunity for the design of algorithms that decide expressibility in
some logical fragment.
We survey the existing results relating the expressibility of regular
languages in logical fragments of MSO[S] with algebraic properties of their
minimal automata. In particular, we show that many of the best known results in
this area share the same underlying mechanics and rely on a very strong
relation between logical substitutions and block-products of pseudovarieties of
monoid. We also explain the impact of these connections on circuit complexity
theory.Comment: 37 page
On the Size Complexity of Non-Returning Context-Free PC Grammar Systems
Improving the previously known best bound, we show that any recursively
enumerable language can be generated with a non-returning parallel
communicating (PC) grammar system having six context-free components. We also
present a non-returning universal PC grammar system generating unary languages,
that is, a system where not only the number of components, but also the number
of productions and the number of nonterminals are limited by certain constants,
and these size parameters do not depend on the generated language
On the state complexity of semi-quantum finite automata
Some of the most interesting and important results concerning quantum finite
automata are those showing that they can recognize certain languages with
(much) less resources than corresponding classical finite automata
\cite{Amb98,Amb09,AmYa11,Ber05,Fre09,Mer00,Mer01,Mer02,Yak10,ZhgQiu112,Zhg12}.
This paper shows three results of such a type that are stronger in some sense
than other ones because (a) they deal with models of quantum automata with very
little quantumness (so-called semi-quantum one- and two-way automata with one
qubit memory only); (b) differences, even comparing with probabilistic
classical automata, are bigger than expected; (c) a trade-off between the
number of classical and quantum basis states needed is demonstrated in one case
and (d) languages (or the promise problem) used to show main results are very
simple and often explored ones in automata theory or in communication
complexity, with seemingly little structure that could be utilized.Comment: 19 pages. We improve (make stronger) the results in section
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